Dominion Post Letter: ANZAC Protests

Today’s editorial in the Dominion Post was absolutely disgusting: comparing us with the Nazi’s that recently celebrated Hitler’s birthday, once again displaying a wilful ignorance of NZ’s militaristic history and taking the slogans and PR of the military as fact. In any case, I rather doubt my letter to the editor from last week is going to apear anytime soon — editorial licence I guess — and so here it is just in case.

To the editor,

There’s been a lot of vitriol in response to the ANZAC day protests around the country, some exclaiming how little we value our “hard won freedom”, others appalled that we would dare burn New Zealand flags, and still others hesitantly supportive but disgusted at our protest on the day itself. I was one of the protesters and this is my short defence.

I am strongly opposed to the military operations in Afghanistan, the Solomon Islands and Timor Leste. All three have been justified based on humanitarian grounds of one sort or another, but it seems far more likely that, like most wars, these are pursued out of economic interests: oil, gold mining and oil, respectively, while New Zealand plays the lackey to the US and Australia.

New Zealand’s history of militarism, despite widespread attempts at revisionism, is equally disgusting: from the Imperial land seizures and assertion of sovereignty over Maori, to the Empire building of the Boer war, the defence of our biggest export market in WWI, the wars against the non-threat of the “communist virus” and the recent participation in the ‘war on terror’.

Meanwhile, every year we commemorate ANZAC day, exclaiming “lest we forget” and “never again”, words in many instances spoken by leaders of that murderous institution that is the military. And while these words of peace are spoken, the military is paraded around and applauded, guns are fired, and its current operations are celebrated. The whole event reeks of hypocrisy and doublespeak.

I will continue to protest the New Zealand military, being — as with all militaries — for the sole purpose of fighting war in the interests of the powerful. And I will continue to protest ANZAC day so long as the military attends as a guest of honour.

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anarchafairy

These are my musings, take them as they are.

I'm from Te Whanganui a Tara, Aotearoa. My main project is publishing radical literature from the deep South Pacific as part of Rebel Press, and also the irregular anarchist journal imminent rebellion.

It’s notable how the defenders of the Anzac tradition always dwell on World War Two, rather than the score of other conflicts Australian and New Zealand troops have taken part in over the last century and a half.

World War Two was the only war in which Anzacs have fought which had any progressive qualities. All the others, from the Waikato War of 1863-64 to the Boer War to the farce of the First World War to the crusades against communism in Korea, Malaya, and Vietnam look very shabby today, when viewed in the cold sober light of fact, rather than through the prism of hysterical jingoism.

And even the hopes of the Anzacs who fought fascism in World War Two were in some cases betrayed, as the Allies turned the defeat of Japan into an operation to prop up rotten empires in the Dutch East Indies and French Indochina, and the war against Hitler segued into vicious anti-communist pogroms in Greece and the cynical division of Europe into US and Soviet spheres of influence.

Anzac Day actually does a grave disservice to the Anzacs who fought against fascism in World War Two, because it links them to criminal enterprises like the Vietnam War. Kiwis like John Mulgan, who hated fascism and fought alongside the European resistance to Hitler, have nothing to do with the Anzacs who terrorised the tangata whenua of Vietnam, or the poor conscripts who died for Winston Churchill’s ego on the beaches of Gallipoli.

Today it is the United States, rather than Germany and Japan, which represents the greatest threat to world peace. The aggressive imperialism of the Bush administration has set the Middle East ablaze and aroused opposition around the world. New Zealand is being dragged into Bush’s war in Afghanistan, and is supplying troops to the US-backed, Australian-led occupations of East Timor and the Solomons. In their opposition to aggressive imperialism and its wars of conquest, the Anzac Day protests actually honour the memories of Kiwis who fought against fascism in World War Two more truly than the warmongers and nationalists rushing to salute the flag.

Scott, I agree with some of what you say, but I guess my point is don’t protest at a memorial service. It’s offensive to protest at a ceremony to remember the dead. However, I agree that the protesters were doing more for peace than the spineless morons with military wet dreams and the politicians using ANZAC day to glorify the military and justify foreign troop deployments.

I disagree that the war weary USA of the late 1940s, after being dragged into two world wars it tried to avoid, deliberately set out to create an empire post WWII. The pseudo-communism propounded by the Soviet Union, with its gulags, the opression of Chechens and other minorities, the famines and purges of the 1930s, the White Sea Canal built by slave labour and massive environmental devastation was every bit as bad as fascism. The Comintern controlled and supported communists througout Europe and Asia, and we were right to oppose this form of “communism”. The Soviet Union is responsible for the militaristic USA we see today.

I’ve always wondered where the line between a military response to genocide and despotism (for example Kosovo, Rwanda or Darfur) ends and a troop deployment to further imperialist interests begins. If the USA or UN doesn’t respond to these sorts of crises, it is criticised. Surely you must agree that troop deployments to stop genocide and despotism are justified in the same way we were right to use force to oppose Nazism and Imperial Japan.

For example, I just don’t see what possible imperialist interest we have in the Solomons, we have nothing to gain by being there. RAMSI was deployed in 2003 after a request from the Solomon Islands goverment, at a time when warlords such as Harold Keke were terrorising the population. It has helped with the humanitarian response to the recent tsunami and the burning of Honiara’s Chinatown. We only have about 100 troops there. Do you really think we are there for imperialist reasons?

I really think this deployment is in stark contrast to, for example, the Australian assistance to the PNG government during the Bougainville conflict to gain control of mineral resources. Can you explain why we shouldn’t be there because I don’t understand where you’re coming from?

I don’t think it should be assumed that all military operations by imperialist powers are primarily motivated by a desire to grab resources. Noam Chomsky parodied this one-dimensional understanding of imperialism when he joked that the US invaded Grenada in the ’80s to secure control of the global trade in nutmeg.

Australasian companies do have interests in the Solomons, particularly where timber, gold, and tourism are concerned, but I think that the primary reason for the intervention that began in 2004 was a desire to maintain stability and Australian/American hegemony in the Pacific. The Solomons had been destabilised by a disastrous IMF ‘reform’ programme (a third of public sector workers sacked overnight!) run out of offices in Canberra and Wellington, and its government was making overtures to France for military assistance. China was also on the horizon. Fearful of the emergence of a ‘failed state’ in their midst, eager to make an example to nearby Papua New Guinea, resentful of the France’s anti-US stance under Chirac, and anxious about the growing influence of China, Australia enlisted New Zealand and several smaller countries in the RAMSI adventure. The argument for the imperialist nature of the adventure has been made at great length on the World Socialist Website Website (www.wsws.org, searchable archives) – I think it is quite significant that the new and sometimes anti-Australian government in the Solomons has quoted WSWS.

Re the aftermath of WW2: the US emerged as a superpower after the war because it had defeated Germany and Japan and usurped the British and French Empires, not because Stalin gave its leaders an excuse for their militarism and expansionism. I don’t think the USSR was comparable to Nazi Germany. Yes, both countries had evil leaders during World War Two, but so did Britain (remember Churchill’s role in Gallipoli, the mass murder of Iraqis in the ’20s, and the Bengali famine?) You don’t deduce the nature of a society from the personality of its leader. I can’t imagine Nazi Germany backing the right side in every anti-colonial and anti-imperialist conflict of the Cold war era, as the Soviet Union. Without the USSR there would be post-apartheid South Africa, no independent Algeria, no Cuba independent of the US, no unified Vietnam, and no Korea at all (the US’s plans to drop 30-40 nuclear weapons on the peninsula were only abandoned after the USSR’s first nuke blast in 1949).

The soldiers did not fight for “the powerful” and do not fight for “the powerful”. Australians and New Zealanders loved the British Empire because it was the best in the world. It provided individual rights, protected from tyrannic monarchs and dictators, and allowed free exchange between individuals world-wide, creating prosperity and happiness as never before.

Soldiers of freedom do exist — they fight for individual rights worldwide. Unfortunately our human animality often allows tribal tyrants to gain power and undermine these individual rights. It is honorable to kill these beasts.